CPRIT Scholars
The CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research program recruits exceptional researchers to Texas universities and/or cancer research institutions to enhance innovative programs of excellence in the state by providing scientific and programmatic support for promising first-time, tenure-track faculty, as well as rising stars and established outstanding investigators.
Kyle Miller
Dr. Kyle Miller received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University College London in the lab of Dr. Julia Cooper at the London Research Institute in London, U.K. He then joined the lab of Dr. David Toczyski in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center for his first postdoctoral training. At the end of 2006, Dr. Miller went to work in the lab of Professor Stephen Jackson, FRS, at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Insitute of Cancer and Developmental Biology at the University of Cambridge, U.K. for a second postdoctoral training. In August 2011, he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and is a member of the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Daisuke Nakada
Dr. Daisuke Nakadareceived his Ph.D. degree from Nagoya University Graduate School of Science in 2005, and completed his postdoctoral research in stem cell biology at University of Michigan in 2011. In November 2011, Dr. Nakada joined the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. He will apply his background in genetics and stem cell biology to understand how cancer cells gain unlimited proliferation capacity.
Lynda Chin
Dr. Lynda Chin received her M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1993, and is a board-certified dermatologist. She conducted her clinical and scientific training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she served as Chief Resident of Dermatology. For the past 14 years, she has been a member of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School communities where she was Professor of Dermatology at the Harvard Medical School, member of the Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Chin also served as the Scientific Director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and co-led the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center’s Melanoma Program and the Harvard Skin SPORE.
Nancy Jenkins
Dr. Nancy A. Jenkins returned to the United States in September 2011 and became Co-Director of the Cancer Biology Program, along with her husband and long-term collaborator, Neal Copeland, at the newly formed Methodist Hospital Research Institute (TMHRI) in Houston, Texas. For more than 30 years, they have model human diseases affecting many organ systems including disorders of the immune, visual, auditory, skeletal, nervous, pigmentation, and hematopoietic systems, in mouse. They have also had a long-standing interest in modeling human cancer in mice and for the past six years have focused exclusively on providing a better understanding of the genetics of cancer with the hope that new drug targets useful in the targeted treatment of human cancer can be identified.
Neal Copeland
Dr. Neal G. Copeland returned to the United States in September 2011 and became Director of the Cancer Biology Program, along with his wife and long-term collaborator, Nancy Jenkins, at the newly formed Methodist Hospital Research Institute (TMHRI) in Houston, Texas. For more than 30 years, they have modeled human diseases affecting many organ systems including disorders of the immune, visual, auditory, skeletal, nervous, pigmentation, and hematopoietic systems, in mouse. They have also had a long-standing interest in modeling human cancer in mice and for the past six years have focused exclusively on providing a better understanding of the genetics of cancer with the hope that new drug targets useful in the targeted treatment of human cancer can be identified.
Herbert Levine
Dr. Herbert Levine is a Professor in the Bioengineering and Physics Departments at Rice. He is also co-director of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center devoted to applying concepts and methods from physical science to complex biological and biomedical problems. He is also coordinator of an international research network of researchers in the Physics of Living Systems, under the auspices of the NSF Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) initiative.
Jeffrey Chang
Dr. Jeffrey Chang inherited his passion for science from his father, a chemist, and his love of numbers from his mother, an accountant. While growing up in Houston, Dr. Chang alternated between two disciplines. In high school, he devoted one summer at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston to a computationally focused biomedical engineering study (with Dr. Rita Patterson), and the next one performing experiments in genetics (with Dr. Rolf Konig). At the time, it was difficult to combine both. But science was moving quickly. In the 90's, automation and computation transformed biology into an information science.
Lauren Ehrlich
Dr. Lauren Ehrlich will join the Molecular Genetics & Microbiology faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in August 2010. Her lab will focus on elucidating interactions between thymocytes (immature T cells) and their surrounding microenvironment during normal and neoplastic T cell development, with the goal of identifying aberrant interactions that contribute to the progression of T cell lymphomas. T cell lymphomas and leukemias are common pediatric malignancies, for which treatments could be significantly improved to reduce toxicity and long-term side effects.
Dmitri Ivanov
Dr. Dmitri Ivanovis a structural biochemist whose work on physical interactions at protein interfaces has already had a significant influence on our thinking about therapeutic approaches to two of the deadliest problems facing the mankind -- AIDs and cancer. He was recruited from Harvard Medical School in February, 2010 to the Dept. of Biochemistry at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. His research program at the The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio will use his expertise in protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions to address one of the major challenges and opportunities of molecular pharmacology.
David Johnson
Dr. David Johnson had a leadership role in CPRIT prior to his recruitment to Texas. Accordingly, CPRlT played a major intellectual role in his attraction to Texas, but no funds were requested to support his efforts. As a major administrative leader at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, he will continue to provide an administrative overview to the Division of Hematology/ Oncology and advice and direction to the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. Based on his ongoing efforts to develop and validate targeted drugs, Dr. Johnson will lead efforts to further develop early phase clinical trials in lung cancer and related disciplines.
Ralf Kittler, Ph.D.
Dr. Ralf Kittler received his Ph.D. degree from the Dresden University of Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Germany) before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in genomics and cancer biology at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology of the University of Chicago. He joined The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center faculty early in 2010 as an Assistant Professor in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development. Dr. Kittler is the first faculty member to be appointed as a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (2010).
Li Ma, Ph.D.
Dr. Li Ma received her Ph.D. from the Sloan-Kettering Institute and the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University in May 2006. She did her postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT in 2006-2010. In September 2010, Dr. Ma will join The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental Radiation Oncology. At MD Anderson, Dr. Ma will investigate the roles and mechanisms of microRNAs in regulating tumor metastasis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition and stem cels, and will develop new candidate therapies for malignant diseases.
Lidong Qin, Ph.D.
Dr. Lidong Qin received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois before postdoctoral training in cancer nanotechnology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He joined The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston faculty in July 2010 as an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Nanomedicine and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Qin proposes to develop integrated proteomic micro-devices for informative cancer diagnosis, malignancy assessment and study of molecular networks in the cancer microenvironment. His studies will provide helpful understanding in prostate cancer at different disease stages.
Jessica Tyler, Ph.D.
Dr. Jessica Tyler is a molecular biologist who uses a wide array of technical approaches to uncover how packaging of our genetic material into chromosomes influences normal cellular functions and how their dysfunction leads to cancer and aging. She was recruited from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in May 2010 to the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center at Houston. Her studies use a combination of molecular genetic in budding yeast, tissue culture studies, biochemistry, biophysics and structural approaches.
Guangbin Dong, Ph.D.
Dr. Guangbin Dong received his B.S. degree from Peking University and completed his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Stanford University with Professor Barry M. Trost. In 2009, He joined the group of Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at California Institute of Technology, as a postdoctoral researcher. His expertise is in the field of organic synthesis, catalysis, organometallics and medicinal chemistry. His future research interests lie at the development of powerful chemical tools for addressing questions of biological importance.
Sean Morrison, Ph.D.
Dr. Sean J. Morrison, is the founding Director of the Children’s Research Institute andthe Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as well as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Morrison laboratory is investigating the mechanisms that regulate stem cell function in the nervous and hematopoietic systems and the ways in which these mechanisms are hijacked by cancer cells to enable neoplastic proliferation and metastasis.
Carol Nilsson, Ph.D.
Dr. Carol L. Nilsson was recruited as Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in August, 2011. After undergraduate studies in chemistry, she obtained her M.D. and Ph.D in Clinical Neurochemistry from Goteborg University (GU), Sweden. She was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (Stockholm, Sweden) and served as Associate Professor of Medical Biochemistry at GU.
Jin Wang, Ph.D.
Dr. Jin Wang received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 2003 and went to the U.S. for graduate school. Under the guidance of Prof. Matthew S. Platz, who is currently the director of the chemistry division at the National Science Foundation, he completed his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the Ohio State University in 2007. Then he joined the group of Prof. Joseph M. DeSimone, Chancellor's Eminent Professor of Chemistry at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a postdoctoral researcher. His future research interests lie at the interface of nanotechnology and biology.
Yonghao Yu
Dr. Yonghao Yu joins the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is an analytical biochemist who uses quantitative mass spectrometry to uncover how signal transduction networks wire in cancer cells. Dr. Yu became fascinated by molecules during his childhood, leading him to pursue his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at Fudan University. There he was named a “Chun-Tsung Scholar” by the Hui-Chun Chin and Tsung-Dao Lee Endowment, and performed undergraduate research in design and characterization of nanoporous materials.
Patrick Potts, Ph.D.
Dr. Patrick Ryan Potts grew up in rural North Carolina and obtained his B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, and his Ph.D. in Cell Regulation from the UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2007. He then did his postdoctoral research at UT Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Biochemistry as a Sara and Frank McKnight Independent Postdoctoral Fellow (2008-2011). In September 2011, Dr. Potts joined the Department of Physiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
Jose Onuchic, Ph.D.
Dr. Jose Onuchic is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University and is the co-Director of the NSF-sponsored Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. Within the CTBP, Dr. Onuchic and his research group have led the biological physics community as it attempts to devise an integrated picture of a variety of model biochemical and biological systems. This integrated view was achieved by the initiation of a broad range of collaborative efforts that enabled Dr. Onuchic to expand his research across the scales of molecular-level interactions to cellular systems to organized multi-cellular structures.
Kathryn O'Donnell, Ph.D.
Dr. Kathryn O’Donnell received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Cornell University in 1998, and subsequently completed an Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. Kathryn then joined the Human Genetics and Molecular Biology Graduate Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was awarded a Ph.D. in 2005. As a graduate student working with Dr. Chi Dang, she focusedon the characterization of target genes of the Myc oncogenic transcription factor that are involved in cellular proliferation and growth control.
Ning Jiang, Ph.D.
Dr. Ning Jiang received her Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology before completing a postdoctoral training at Stanford University. She will join the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the spring of 2012. Her research interests is focused on using a systems approach, combining high-throughput sequencing and microfluidics single cell analysis, to profile the T cell repertoire in tumor infiltrating lymphocytes.
Xin Liu, Ph.D.
My passion for quantitative biosciences dates back to my childhood years, with inherent curiosity about mathematics cultivated by my parents. While in high school, I became fascinated by chemistry and biology, which led me to choose biochemistry as my major of undergraduate education at Nanjing University, Jiangsu, China. I received my Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and I did my thesis study with Dr. Ronen Marmorstein at the Wistar Institute, where I learned one of the most important techniques in quantitative biosciences and structural biology, X-ray crystallography. During my time as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Roger Kornberg at Stanford University, I continued my training of X-ray crystallography complemented with biochemical reconstitution and electron microscopy, focusing on large macromolecular assemblies.
Hamid Mirzaei, Ph.D.
Dr. Hamid Mirzaei is an accomplished analytical chemist with extensive training in systems biology. He was recruited to join the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center from Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle where he used the power of quantitative proteomics to decipher complex cell regulatory mechanisms such as transcription factor mediated gene regulation and protein ubiquitination.
Robert Lenkinski, Ph.D.
Dr. Robert Lenkinski is a chemist by training. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1968 and completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1973 at the University of Houston. His thesis topic was the use of Lanthanide Chelates as Shift Reagents in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Dr. Lenkinski was a post-doctoral fellow in the Isotope Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. After the completion of his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Lenkinski began his independent academic research career by focusing on the use of NMR methods to determine the “solution” structures of small peptide hormones and anti-cancer antibiotics. He was recruited to the faculty of the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania 1986 as an Associate Professor. His research focus shifted to developing a program in clinical in vivo MR spectroscopy and integrating MR spectroscopy with MR imaging. The University of Pennsylvania had one of the first GE whole body 1.5T MR scanners.
Taiping Chen, Ph.D.
Dr. Taiping Chen is a geneticist and molecular biologist who studies the regulation and biological functions of epigenetic mechanisms, particularly DNA methylation and histone modifications, in the mammalian system. He was recruited from Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in September 2011 to the Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at Science Park, Smithville.
Joshua Mendell, Ph.D
Dr. Joshua Mendell attained his undergraduate degree in Biology at Cornell University in 1996 and subsequently completed an M.D.-Ph.D degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2003. Josh further pursued a year of postdoctoral research with Hal Dietz at Johns Hopkins. During his doctoral and post-doctoral training, Josh studied nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD), a ubiquitous pathway in eukaryotic cells through which messenger RNAs containing premature translation termination codons are targeted for degradation. He made important contributions to this field including the identification and functional characterization of core mammalian components of the NMD pathway and the demonstration that mammalian NMD functions not only as a quality control checkpoint during gene expression, but more broadly as a physiologic regulator of thousands of natural transcripts.
